Search 

Business development in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh

Flow of concentrated suspensions, shear thickening, granulation, dispersing powders in liquids, bacteria as colloids, dispersing bacteria in emulsions, motile bacteria in polymer solutions, imaging the flow of complex fluids, colloid-polymer mixtures, shelf life of colloidal gels

I'm an experimentalist who uses microscopy to study soft materials such as colloidal pastes and emulsions.

My experimental expertise is optical microscopy and confocal microscopy.  My lab group is good at image analysis:  if you can see it with your eye in the microscope image, we can probably get a computer to see it as well.  Furthermore, we can follow objects seen in movies over long periods of time.  For some of our studies of colloidal pastes, for example, we can follow the Brownian motion of several thousand micron-sized particles over several minutes or longer.

My scientific expertise is in "jammed" materials such as colloidal pastes, stiff foams, and high-droplet-content emulsions.  If you can make a pile of it on a table, I'm interested in studying it.  If you can change it so it flows, I'm curious about that too.  We love taking movies of stuff flowing under a microscope, and trying to relate microscopic behaviors to macroscopic properties.  Movies can be seen at my laboratory website:  http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/lab/

I'm visiting Edinburgh for the summer, and have been collaborating with folks in Edinburgh for over a decade now (primarily Prof. Wilson Poon).